If that is the case, I feel this is a disservice to young humans: we ought to be exposing them to as broad a range of human thought as possible, and not narrowly focusing on a passion. The idea (as I understand it) seems to be a recipe for producing narrow humans.
This will very likely be a +1 over the status quo for 400 to 500 kids, at least over a 4 to 10 year period. But I expect that success will have more to do with the quality of the leadership than the soundness of the model -- which means this won't scale past the supply of Zamanskys and Spolskys.
And I'm afraid the characterization of the various symptoms skates around the deeper and touchier problems. (Some kids, in _school_ are struggling b/c their English isn't there yet, so let's focus them on subjects they can excel at anyway? Umm . . . ) That is understandable, it's a constructive effort, no point in picking fights and many people seem to believe those problems are beyond the reach of policy in any case. It seems Joel doesn't even agree with me about all of those. But the larger system ain't going anywhere until we tackle those issues. The larger problem is that we can't even discuss any of that without the whole thing turning into a food fight.
I admire the generosity here, I sympathize with the urgency to do _something_. But I really worry that efforts like this will divert a lot of valuable concern into sideroads without much potential for the larger system.
Sometimes the best ideas don't come to you until you've worked and struggled with the existing tools and materials to appreciate the difference between practice and theory.